Andrew Clavin contrasts Hillsdale College’s faith-based worldview with what he calls secular America’s "insane asylum," citing a 266% rise in atheism and skyrocketing mental health crises among younger generations. He mocks leftist hypocrisy—from Pete Buttigieg’s moral double standards to AOC’s performative racialism—and dismisses UBI as socialist folly, arguing only spiritual frameworks like Christianity can ground human ambition. Clavin frames immigration as a "spiritual problem," ties border chaos to Congress’s inaction, and warns against right-wing apology culture, ending by promoting Daily Wire as the antidote to leftist media’s moral decay. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time for America to take a good long look in the mirror, a very large mirror that can hold an entire country in it, and ask itself, America, how are you ever going to recover from the disaster of the Trump administration?
In the aftermath of this tragic detour from our noble history, how will we manage to move past a world in which horrifically deplorable red state troglodytes, some of whom don't even have the common decency to live in Los Angeles, have actual jobs with rising wages instead of the life of unemployment and despair they so richly deserve.
These, after all, are the kinds of jobs our upstanding scandal-free last president Barack Obama told us were never coming back.
How despicable that Trump has undermined America's faith in the institution of the presidency by making Obama look like an incompetent buffoon.
On top of this, these new jobs could have gone to some needy African child, bringing a few extra pennies an hour into his struggling life.
Instead, under Trump, these jobs have been plucked from that child's hungry little hands by racist white males in some god-awful place like Iowa.
At least I assume they're racist white males.
I've never been to Iowa, but who else would live in a place like that?
Also, many of these new jobs are producing energy through dangerous processes like whatever they do to produce energy.
And as we all know, within 12 years, energy production will totally destroy life in our imaginations.
Though, of course, real life will continue with its grotesque jet travel and electricity making the world worse for everyone.
But don't lose hope.
Trump can't stay in office forever.
Sometime soon, our nation will begin to heal and return to the days when the cop on the beat could be falsely accused of racism so that riots destroyed black communities and distracted the locals from the crappy economy brought on by leftist policies.
There are great days still ahead.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Spirit Of Antichrist00:15:37
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we're back.
I'm here for the second week in Hillsdale College as the, what am I, the Pulliam Distinguished Fellow in Journalism.
And you can see, I think, from my gray beard, what a distinguished fellow, in fact, I am.
I'll be traveling back to L.A. on Thursday, so there'll be no show, and then we'll have Friday, a show on Friday for the last day of the week before we plunge into the Clavenless weekend, and you're all destroyed, and it doesn't matter anyway.
This is, I've got to tell you, this college is a remarkable place.
It's a special place.
It's largely a Christian college.
I think they recently declared itself officially a Christian college governed by Christian ideas.
And the students and professors here talk a lot about the good and the true and the beautiful.
And of course, they don't all agree on everything.
They tend to be conservative, but not all of them are Republican.
And some of the left-wing ideas that are circulating around out there are brooded about here, which is a good thing, right?
Students should explore and experiment with different ideas, even crazy left-wing ones.
But to discuss those ideas with the underlying knowledge that there's such a thing as God and he's really there, it changes everything.
To accept that there's a spiritual reality that this material world only expresses, to understand that material is merely the language in which the spirit speaks, makes discussing the good, the true, and the beautiful make a whole lot more sense.
Over the weekend, I was trying to explain to my wife what it was that I found so restful about being here, and I finally said to her, it's kind of like being sane.
It's the opposite of Los Angeles.
It's the opposite of engaging with an increasingly atheist world.
It's like suddenly I'm not in an insane asylum.
Because the thing about God is, he's actually there.
Everything that is speaks of him.
And when you refuse to acknowledge that what is there is there, there's a word for that.
You call it crazy.
You cannot believe in God.
You cannot believe in gravity.
But ultimately, living in crazy world is not going to make you happy.
And increasingly, I feel all of us, even those of us who actually believe, are accepting certain premises that only make sense in a purely material world.
And I'll show you what I mean.
You know, we can't have Knowles on.
Knowles usually comes on on Monday and we discuss the culture and so forth.
And today I can't have him on due to the technical difficulties of getting him, hooking up his mic to my mic where I am.
But I'm going to have him on in spirit so I can have somebody to make fun of.
I cannot believe I'm saying this, but Knowles wrote an excellent, excellent piece on the rise of atheism, which you can find on the Daily Wire.
I think using words may be a whole new career for the guy.
I think it really seems to work for him.
But let me just read you a little piece of what, what's his name?
Knowles.
What did he write?
He wrote, for the first time in history, atheists constitute the largest religious group in America.
According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who have no religion has increased 266% over the past three decades and now account for 23.1% of the population, just barely outedging, just barely edging out Catholics and evangelicals as the nation's dominant faith.
Mainline Protestant churches have suffered the greatest collapse.
As religiosity has declined, social ills have abounded.
Nearly one in five American adults suffers from anxiety disorders, which now constitute the most common mental illness in the country.
One in six Americans takes antidepressant drugs, a 65% surge over just 15 years.
The problem is particularly acute among younger Americans.
While depression diagnoses have increased 33% since 2013, that number is up 47% among millennials and 63% among teenagers.
Coincidentally, suicide rates among American teenagers have increased by 70% since 2006.
American life expectancy declined again last year as Americans continue to drug and kill themselves at record rates.
Social scientists have long since established the link between religiosity and life satisfaction.
As social psychologist Sonia Lubormirski observes, people who attend religious services several times each week are nearly twice as likely as those who worship less than once a month to describe themselves as very happy.
Such psychologists simply state the obvious, that belief, the belief that God loves you and that you will live with him in eternity offers greater consolation than the view of death as a dirt nap that stiffens you into worm food.
Now, here's the thing.
Everything that Knowles writes there is absolutely true.
I mean, it really is quite something.
You know, when you think about the rise in antidepressants, think about this.
When they invented a cure for polio, polio basically was eradicated.
They invented antidepressants that are supposed to cure or relieve depression, and yet depression goes up.
Now, I'm always hesitant to talk about that because I don't want anybody to go off his meds on my account.
I understand that some people do have chemical imbalances, but the idea that you can fix your depression with medication is simply flawed.
It is a flawed idea.
Think of it this way.
You know, people talk about an adrenaline rush, the way these lies kind of enter into our language.
We say, oh, I was going down in a bob sled and I felt an adrenaline rush.
As if the adrenaline causes the excitement.
What causes the excitement is going downhill in a bobsled.
The adrenaline is the material that translates that excitement into a material experience.
If I were to inject you with adrenaline, you would have the same experience, but it wouldn't relate to anything.
It wouldn't relate to the truth.
Your body is key to communicate to you what you, the real you, is feeling.
It makes no sense to say the adrenaline causes the rush because even though the adrenaline can cause you the feeling of a rush, it's not the same thing.
And as somebody who took antidepressants once said to me, I'm still depressed.
I just can't feel it anymore.
So that is one of the problems.
The idea that we are a bag of chemicals and if you just adjust the chemicals right, everything will be tickety-boo is a flawed idea, okay?
And the thing that I noticed in Knowles' article is it's true that religion gives you consolation.
It is true that religion will make you happier.
But that's not why you should be religious, obviously.
I mean, you're not religious.
You can't believe because it makes you happier.
You're happier because you see the world as it is.
Because if you don't see the world as it is, if you think like, oh, I can walk off a cliff and float, ultimately, it's not going to be as much fun as if you realize don't walk off the cliff, right?
When you know the contours of reality, the closer you come to the contours of reality, the happier ultimately you're going to be.
You don't believe in God because he makes you happy.
He makes you happy because believing in God is realistic.
He makes you happy because he's there.
He makes you happy because he loves you, and that's also a major truth of life.
You know, Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but it turns out that opium is the religion of the masses.
It turns out that all the people who left God behind, all the people who left family behind, all the people who left the old values behind, are killing themselves with opiates because they're not living in reality.
And so they have to leave and go somewhere else and medicate themselves, self-medicate to fight the pain of the confusion they have, you know, the confusion of what reality is like.
So why aren't we talking about this all the time?
If everybody is so unhappy, why aren't we talking about it?
Well, let me show you why.
I can show you a perfect example of why we're not talking about it.
This is this clown, this evangelical Rick Wiles.
And so since we've talked about Knowles, now let's talk about somebody at the Daily Wire with actual talent and ability.
We'll talk about Ben.
Rick Wiles is an evangelical.
He has, I guess it's a website or a TV station that's not getting enough money.
People aren't sending him enough money for his evangelical station.
And so who does he blame?
He blames Ben because the Daily Wire is doing well.
The Daily Wire is getting money.
And he says, why are people sending money to that evil, evil Ben Shapiro?
This is one of the most remarkable pieces of video I have ever seen.
You really have to, if you missed this over the weekend, you've got to take a look.
Ben Shapiro denies the deity of Jesus Christ.
I've heard him say this before.
What I'm shocked by is that there are millions of conservatives in this country, including Christians, who support him.
Yeah, go gaga over him.
Yes.
They'll buy his books.
They'll boost his career.
And yet he openly denies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
That makes him an antichrist.
St. John said that anybody who denies that Jesus Christ came to earth as God in human flesh is antichrist.
There is no one Antichrist.
There is a spirit of Antichrist.
And Ben Shapiro has the spirit of Antichrist because he denies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
He denies that he's resurrected.
He said, we don't even use that word resurrected.
He's a Kabbalah.
I can't imagine why people aren't sending this guy money.
You know, listening to that, I almost began to suspect that Ben was one of those Jews.
I don't know what gave him away.
Now, listen, I know Ben.
I work with Ben.
I consider myself.
I consider Ben a friend.
I can testify Ben is the Antichrist.
Of course, we all know that.
I think that goes without saying.
But I mean, what I think is the point is, is we have endured.
Ben and I disagree about the divinity of Christ.
Only one of us can be right.
This is true.
Only one of us is right about the divinity of Christ.
Why don't we just put a rag in our teeth and have a knife fight and settle it that way, right?
Because for centuries, that's what people did.
For centuries, they came.
If you believed in a different God, they came and they beheaded you or they rode their horses into your field and set you on fire.
The Muslims, that was how Islam got its start.
Christianity got to start in a much more wholesome way by convincing people, but there were plenty of times that the Crusaders stopped off on their way to Outreamer.
They stopped off to kill the Jews in their localities saying, Well, we can't go and fight the infidel overseas before, which may have been justified, right?
That may have been a justified war before we stop off and kill these harmless Jews in our territory.
We started to understand that this solves nothing.
Whether Christ is divine or not is not going to be solved by Ben and me hitting each other over the head.
It's not going to change a single thing.
It's not going to change a single thing about reality.
So we developed a system, which, by the way, was recommended to us by Jesus when he said, give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, give unto God the things that are God's.
We developed a system called humility.
We don't know.
We believe in things.
We have faith in things, right?
That's why they call it faith.
They don't call it knowledge.
They call it faith.
We understand that we have to be humble about what we have faith about.
And look, if in my belief, if living into my belief, it looks like, gee, that guy is a little happier than other people.
He maneuvers through reality a little better than other people.
That's going to bring people over to your side because the things that work are the things that work, and the things that work draw people to you.
But obviously, we don't want to get into those fights or have that kind of mentality of a Rick Wiles where we say, oh, if you disagree with me, you're the Antichrist or you're the evil guy or whatever.
You know, I pick apart ideas that I don't like in other religions when they have an effect on me.
I don't pick apart, there are plenty of religions I don't believe in.
I don't believe in Buddhism, Hinduism, but I don't pick on them.
I don't attack them unless they're doing something that maybe blows up my train.
Then I start to get a little worried.
Here's the other thing that it doesn't look like to talk about God.
You know, there's this guy, the mayor of wherever he's the mayor of, Pete Budejej.
This is worse than Devin Nunes.
You know, just as I learned to pronounce Devin Nunes, I've got Pete Budejej.
And the press is trying to build him into something.
And maybe they'll succeed.
I don't know.
He's another one of these left-wingers who basically sells themselves, as Obama did, as a moderate, where when you look at his voting record and you look at his actual beliefs, he is for everything that the left is for.
He just manages to put it in different, in more moderate terms.
He's a military guy, good for him, that's great.
You know, he has a kind of like a pleasant demeanor and a pleasant face and all this, and he speaks as a reasonable person, but he's still a left-winger.
So he goes off on evangelicals for supporting Trump.
And this is what he said.
Well, it's something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable.
Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture or in church, where it's about lifting up the least among us and taking care of strangers, which is another word for immigrants, and making sure that you're focusing your effort on the poor, but also personally, how you're supposed to conduct yourself.
Not chest-thumping, look at me-ism, but humbling yourself before others.
Foot washing is one of the central images in the New Testament.
And we see the diametric opposite of that in this presidency.
I think there was perhaps a cynical process where he decided to, for example, begin to pretend to be pro-life and govern accordingly, which was good enough to bring many evangelicals over to his side.
even on the version of Christianity that you hear from the religious right, which is about sexual ethics.
I can't believe that somebody who is caught writing hush money checks to adult film actresses is somebody they should be lifting up as the kind of person you want to be leading this nation.
That's an amazing, amazing act of hypocrisy and typical of the left.
The left is always basically saying that we just want to be fair, but what they really want is a transfer of power from what they think is our unfair power to their unfair power.
So here's a guy.
He's gay.
He's for abortion.
Now, listen, you know that I'm a liberal when it comes to gay people, but still, most evangelicals are opposed to homosexuality and believe it to be at least a disorder, possibly a sin.
They're certainly against abortion.
So what is he talking about?
He's saying that we should condemn certain things that Trump has done.
And by the way, I don't approve of cheating on your wife with porn stars and then telling them that they have to be silent and paying them off.
That doesn't seem like a good way to live to me.
But it's not for me to pass judgment on Donald Trump on those terms.
And yet we're not supposed to pass judgment on him for supporting abortion or for being gay or whatever.
I mean, all he's saying is it's that old-fashioned idea of Christianity as a team.
Our side, our team is the Christian team.
And when you're on our team, you get to say everybody else is a bad guy.
That's all he's doing.
He's transferring it from one point of view to another, from one set of condemnatory attitude to another.
Condemnatory attitudes that now suddenly exclude him and his abortion and his gayness, that's suddenly excluded.
But Trump's hanging out with porn stars, that's suddenly included in what we're going to contend.
Worldview Shifts00:13:58
No, absolutely not.
Modesty and humility when it comes to faith, and certainly when it comes to judging our neighbor and his sins, because of course, who's righteous?
None of us is righteous.
So since we're talking about our Daily Wire family, we've been through Knowles, we've been through Ben.
Let's talk about Matt Walsh for a minute.
Matt was on Ben's show and said that when you're arguing with non-believers, you shouldn't use the Bible.
And people started picking on him.
They started beating him up on this.
Oh, but the Bible is all truth.
When you give up the Bible, you've given up your most potent weapon against, which makes no sense.
It's like the same as the people who tell me that I should model a better world in my art instead of writing about the world as it is.
That would make me feel pious.
Arguing with the Bible would make me feel pious.
But if the person you're talking to doesn't believe in the Bible, it's useless.
It's absolutely useless.
You know, if you say to him, well, in chapter this, verse that, you know, the Bible says this, and he's thinking like, what do I care?
What do I care what the Bible says?
I mean, they have no sense of what it takes to bring the word to other people.
Who was it?
I think St. Francis said, preach the gospel if you must use words.
You know, I think that what Matt is talking about is right.
You know, we're not arguing.
We're not here to argue with each other over, certainly over religious details.
We're talking about a worldview.
That's what I'm trying to get at.
What I'm trying to get at is we're talking about a worldview in which there is a level of moral reality to our lives, in which there is a level of spirituality to our lives.
We are not bags of chemicals.
We are the way that spirit speaks.
Matter, our bodies, are the way that spirit speaks.
You know, it's very rare that wisdom comes to us from the left.
But because I'm going to get to politics and I want to talk about politics, but I just wanted to set this up.
Chelsea Handler's on Bill Maher, and she comes in and she talks about her reaction to Trump's election.
Listen to this.
Yeah, I had a midlife identity crisis once Trump won the election because I had never had my world feel so unhinged, I think.
And I had to pay a psychiatrist to listen to me bitch about Donald Trump for about the first three weeks.
And then once we got past that and we got to the real stuff, I realized the parallel there was my world becoming unhinged when I was a little girl.
My brother died when I was nine years old.
I had never related the two, but for me, as I can imagine, it must have been for so many people.
It was a huge emotional trigger of everything being destabilized.
And I realized just how spoiled and privileged I'd been all my life to realize to be this upset and this at a 10 every day and the outrage and the anger.
I just wanted to fight people, you know?
And I was like, I got to go see a psychiatrist.
Well, good for her.
What she found out, I mean, listen, you've been listening for the last two years plus to the left going insane.
You've seen the New York Times sell every principle it ever used to report on just to become an anti-Trump vehicle.
You've seen Brian Stelter babbling incoherently just to blame everything on Trump.
You've seen Congressman Adam Schiff selling every principle possible to continue to condemn Trump.
You've seen all these guys go nuts.
Chelsea Handler discovered the secret.
If you're that crazy about politics, something is missing from you.
Something is wrong with you.
This has nothing to do with fighting for freedom.
It has nothing to do with standing when based bedrock American principles are truly under threat.
This has to do with one president over another.
You know, I always laugh at the left when they tell me, oh, you voted for Donald Trump, what an evil guy.
And I keep thinking, you ran Hillary Clinton.
You ran a career criminal.
You ran the al Capone of the Democrat Party.
And you're complaining that I voted for Donald Trump.
If you had run Abraham Lincoln, believe me, I would have voted for Abraham Lincoln over Donald Trump.
But when you run Hillary Clinton, you got no argument.
You got no argument.
If you're that insane over politics and the usual back and forth over American politics, something is missing in your life.
And that is why, you know, when Obama was re-elected, when he was re-elected, I was genuinely sad.
I thought I had convinced myself that Mitt Romney had a chance, and I thought that Obama had done such a bad job in his first term that I kind of trusted the American people to toss him out in his ear.
When they didn't, I was sad.
It lasted about an hour.
I mean, it lasted about an hour and then went back to what we do here.
We fight to move the ball the next time down the field.
We fight for the next play.
I will say I was a little depressed about the idea of four more years of listening to Obama use the word I. Obama was in Germany the other day and he used I, I think it was over 460 times in one speech.
So Grabian, just to serve the public, put together just a little montage of all the I's in Obama's speech.
I had with me, I was, which meant I was, I asked myself, all right, I can do that I care deeply about.
I believe climate change.
I believe gender equality.
I believe I could have.
There's only one of me.
And I can, and I know I'm at, I hope.
I'm not, I've held my last political office, but I'm assuming I always, I think I'm going to start.
So actually, am I correct?
Before I came out, that I had when I was, I wanted, I wanted what I wanted.
And I was elected in my office, and I'd say, when I helped, I was the first, if I had, and my theory, when I can get, turns out it's only mine.
If I can, my own, as I said, I'd like, I'd like to, I actually think I'd have to say no, I'm sorry.
And so I'm not going to, I know that I had to work on that I want what I, that's what I'm going to do now.
So yeah, listening to that for four more years did, I have to say, make me a little sad for a while.
I like the line in there.
It's buried in there.
There's only one of me.
And I just felt like if there's only one of you, why do you have to refer to yourself 400 times?
There's one of you like once or twice might be good.
Compare that, by the way, to the first George Bush, who used to take every speech and give it what they called an eyeectomy.
He would cut the eyes out of it.
Obama said something else as well, because he's looking at these leftists.
And when Obama ran the first time, he ran this close to being a Republican, certainly a moderate, certainly a right-wing Democrat.
He was going to fix immigration.
He believed in God.
He was against gay marriage.
He really ran a dishonest campaign.
And so when he says what he says here, he's really not telling Democrats to compromise.
What he's telling them to do is lie.
And this is the cut.
I just want to make sure we get the right Obama cut here.
This is the cut when he, cut number five.
One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States, maybe it's true here as well, is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ah, I'm sorry, this is how it's going to be.
And then we start sometimes creating what's called a circular firing squad where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.
And when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens.
There again, what's he talking about?
He's talking about politics replacing religion.
He's talking about politics becoming your moral path, your pathway to morality.
He's talking about judging everything by politics instead of by your inner compass, instead of by your spiritual knowledge, that wisdom that you come equipped with, that wisdom that you learn by studying scripture, by studying the people who've come before you and who think these things through.
And if ever there was a good example of this, it's our old friend Alexandria Occasional Cortex, who is so in, I mean, she is, everybody compares her to Trump, and there's certain fair comparisons there.
She's got the same kind of viciousness when attacked.
She doesn't know enough.
I mean, Trump has learned stuff over the years, but Alexandria, no.
But she also reminds me of Obama in her just the fact that she is just so lost in her own world.
She is so completely in her own head that no fact could ever reach her.
I mean, that is the story of the Obama era.
It's the story of the Obama era.
Nothing could reach that guy because he did not know what he didn't know.
So now she's getting, she has replaced religion with politics.
And she has an, you know, the left has a complete version of religion, just like Freud had a complete version of psychology that was Christianity turned to material.
The left has a complete version of politics that's Christianity turned to materialism.
And of course, the apocalypse is climate change.
And she went on her, whatever it is she talks on Instagram and told us that we're all going to be so, so sorry that we didn't get behind the Green New Deal.
This is an amazing little clip, too.
You got to watch this.
It's cut 11.
There are a lot of people who hide the fact that their families and that their grandparents fought against principles of equal rights in the United States, not 100 years ago, not 80 years ago, but in this generation's lifetime.
So just know that while a lot of people can hide that their grandparents did that in the civil rights movement, you should also know that the internet documents everything and your grandchildren will not be able to hide the fact that you fought against acknowledging and taking bold actions on climate change.
And people who are trying to mock and delay this moment, I mean, I just feel bad for you.
I just pity you for your role in history right now.
Makes me feel better that AOC pities me for my role in history.
You know, that's her religion.
That is her religion now, this religion of materialism, the religion that it's not, you know, it's not God who's going to come and destroy the world because the story has come to an end.
It's our horrible oil and our horrible energy and all that, those cows with gas and electricity and all those things.
That's going to destroy us.
Those are our sins.
Because of course, you know, it's classic.
We are made for God.
Everything in us is made for God.
Everything that was described in the godly literature is describing us.
It's describing what we see and how we experience the world.
And if you take God out of it, all that stuff is going to attach to something else, like a suction cup.
It's just going to go and find somewhere else to have those things fulfilled.
If you are not feeling the peace that comes with God, you're going to be taking opiates.
If you're not feeling the guilt and repentance that comes with God, you're going to get into this incredible cultural revolution style, screaming at everybody for their sins.
If you're not understanding how the world ends and that the world is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, you're going to see catastrophe coming at you everywhere.
By the way, this is a little off topic, but I just have to play this clip because it cracked me up so badly.
And then we'll take a quick break.
But this also applies to this whole obsession with race.
Racism and racialism are materialism as another way of looking at materialism.
You stop looking at the individual.
You stop looking at his spirit.
You stop looking at the content of his character, and all you see is the color of his skin.
And that is leftism in a nutshell.
That is the intersectionality.
It's just pure materialism writ large.
It's pure racism writ large as far as I'm concerned.
There was a clip.
It's just hilarious.
AOC talking to a largely black crowd and doing that Hillary Clinton thing where she slipped into a black accent, which is the most condescending and self-unaware thing I can imagine.
You just got to listen to it.
It's hilarious.
This is what organizing looks like.
This is what building power looks like.
This is what changing the country looks like.
It's when we choose to show up and occupy the room and talk about the things that matter most, talking about our future.
You know, Reverend, you bring up a funny anecdote, and I'm proud to be a bartender.
Ain't nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with working retail, folding clothes for other people to buy.
There is nothing wrong with preparing the food that your neighbors will eat.
There is nothing wrong with driving the buses that take your family to work.
I cannot imagine.
You know, the one thing you got to say about Donald Trump, say what you will about him.
He's got his flaws, no question about it.
Big flaws.
He's a big character.
You cannot imagine him changing the way he talks when he goes to speak to others.
They keep calling him racist.
I can't imagine Donald Trump ever going there and suddenly speaking with poor grammar and speaking like that.
It was like she thought she was speaking to children.
I do not understand why my fellow Americans who are black put up with that at all.
And I've got to say, in my sexist way, I know I'm a sexist, but I cannot understand why black men put up with that at all.
I cannot understand how a man, any man, could be treated like that and come back and vote for you again.
I mean, to me, the minute you start talking to me like that, the minute you stop telling me that I'm helpless without the government, I'm out the door.
Unbelievable.
You've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe while you're there.
People And Willpower00:15:07
Here I am.
I'm making all this talk about Knowles and Ben and Walsh.
It's all available for you for a lousy 10 bucks a month, lousy 100 bucks for a year.
If you come for the whole year, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
You get to be in the mailbag.
Sometimes we'll even let you out of the bag and you can ask questions and I will answer all your questions, solve all your problems for a mere 100 bucks a year.
That's a pretty good deal.
Come on over to dailywire.com.
All right, let's just spread this out a little bit, just a little, widen our lens.
I wanted to step back and just take a look at this for a minute because it really is a weird feeling to be in a place where people believe, where people speak, disagree, but all speak with the premise that we're dealing with a spiritual world.
I was listening to Andrew Yang.
Andrew sticking with our Daily Wire family here.
Andrew Yang is a philanthropist and entrepreneur and seems like a pretty decent fellow.
And Ben had him on his Sunday special.
And Yang is running on this universal income, which I just think is one of the worst ideas in the world.
They're always quoting Milton Friedman about it.
But just remember, Milton Friedman said it was a pipe dream because his idea was to get rid of all other welfare as a way of weaning people off welfare to give people a universal income instead of welfare.
There would be no other programs.
If that's what you're talking about, I'll talk about it, but nobody's really talking about that.
They're just saying they're going to give you money.
Socialism solves all problems with money.
What's the problem with that?
The problem with that is the same problem as trying to solve everything with chemicals, right?
Your body is the language.
It's the word in which the spirit speaks.
Your body is the language in which the spirit speaks.
Money too.
Money is a symbol.
It's a symbol of your desires.
It's a symbol of your ambition.
It's a symbol of what you want and what you construct.
That's what it's a symbol of.
If I take it away and give it to somebody else, I think I'm solving his problem, but I'm not because he's got a problem that has kept him from having any money in the first place.
And I'm taking away from you your incentive, your reward, the mark of your ambition.
That's all it is.
It's just a symbol.
It's like my taking a piece of your body away and giving it to someone else saying, well, you had two arms and he had no arms, so now you'll both have one arm.
It's just exactly the same thing.
You cannot solve it that way.
So Ben challenges Yang and he says to him, you know, you say that jobs give people meaning, but then you say that nobody wants to work.
And here I want to play not Ben's question, but Yang's response.
If you look at what happens to idle men in particular, we spend a lot of time on the computer playing video games and doing other things.
We volunteer less than employed men, even though we have more time.
Our drinking and substance abuse tends to go up.
And over time, there are some antisocial patterns that develop in idle men to a higher degree than women.
And so that's just data.
And so if you look at that and you say, okay, this actually is pretty consistent with my intuition that work is incredibly important and vital.
It provides structure, purpose, fulfillment, meaning, social structures to people every day.
And so the question is, how do we create more things like that?
Now, to me, the best path to create that is to put economic resources into people's hands in the form of a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month, which would then allow more people to do the sort of work that either they want to do or that their community has a need for.
And the goal is to create jobs.
And putting $1,000 a month into people's hands would create at least 2 million new jobs just because the buying power would just go right back into local businesses and communities.
That's a completely incoherent thing.
The guy sounds like a smart guy, but that's just incoherent.
That's like Nancy Pelosi, who once said the greatest job creator is unemployment, unemployment insurance.
And I thought, that's great.
And all we need is for everyone to be out of work, and then everyone will have a job.
You know, I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense.
Capitalism is a system built for using the way that people are.
It is made to use the way that people are.
The thing that he says there is that jobs give meaning.
That's not true, but I'll get back to that in a minute.
But people don't want to work.
Now, that part is true, right?
I love my work.
I love my work.
I love writing.
I love what I do here.
I just really love it.
But, you know, I don't want to go to work.
You know, it's work.
I mean, a body that's at rest tends to remain at rest.
Inertia just keeps you where you are.
It takes willpower to do the thing that you want to do.
Money is a great instigator.
Money is a great incentive to go out and do that work.
Take that incentive away.
What on earth makes him think that suddenly people are going to want to work?
The people who have stores, who have jobs that these people can spend their free money at, right, they'll go on working and they'll take the free money that they got to be recirculating their money.
But it's not going to make the person who's getting the money do anything.
Of course it's not.
If the people have that extra money and they cannot work, they'll not work.
The thing is, you know, meaning you have to work to find meaning.
You have to not do, all our desires are like wild horses, you know, whether it's ambition or lust or whatever it is.
We have to ride that horse and force it to go where we want it to go, not where it wants to go, because it wants everything, right?
Your ambition wants everything.
It doesn't care if I have to kill the guy next to me to get what he has.
I want it.
My lust wants everything.
It doesn't want just my wife.
It wants every other girl.
You know, I've got to ride that horse and make sure it goes where I want it to go.
And capitalism really helps with that.
It really does.
It doesn't work.
Capitalism doesn't work with no values.
It doesn't work without Christianity.
It doesn't work without religion because it's just like socialism.
It is just a materialist way of being, but it's still more in line with the way people are.
I mean, listen, I'm not asking for us to go back to any religious wars.
I'm not asking us to be able to sit and pass judgment.
I'm simply asking us to talk about the human condition as it is.
I'm simply asking us to talk about reality as it is.
God makes you happy because God is there.
God makes you happy in the same way believing in gravity makes you happy.
If you don't believe in gravity, you're going to have a very short and ugly life, you know?
And if you don't believe in God, the same kind of problems are going to occur because you don't know the truth.
You don't know the way the world really works.
Ben and I don't have to argue about the divinity of Christ, right?
We're talking about what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the thing that is the basic idea that underlies all religions.
All religions have an idea that there are certain things that are true about the human condition that do not change, that there are men and there are women, there's good and there's bad.
If we can't speak at that level, if we can't speak about that at that level, and you think you're going to solve everything by moving money around or by taking drugs, if you think it's all going to be solved by material means, we are all going downhill.
And if you think that the reason to believe in God is because he makes you happy, you're making the wrong argument.
That's the wrong argument.
You don't believe in any, you can't believe in anything because it makes you happy.
I mean, you know, it would make me happy if like angels dance on the head of pins.
I don't believe in that because I don't see the evidence of that.
But the evidence of God is all around you.
It makes you happy because you're telling the right thing.
Just one piece of news I want to cover is, of course, this border crisis that we're having.
And we'll talk about this more as the week goes on.
People pouring in, using this loophole in our laws.
All you have to do is say you want asylum.
They have to basically hold you.
But if they hold you, they have to separate your kids.
But if they separate your kids, the news people start weeping because they want to destroy the country by letting everybody in.
And they know that's an emotional way of doing it.
Believe me, it's not about the kids.
So they're bussing people into the interior because they don't know what to do with them.
They have to release them.
Of course, once you release them, you'll never see them again.
But of course, it's not a crisis.
Don't think for a minute it's a crisis, but it's a crisis.
And Trump says this.
This is Trump's remark on the whole thing.
So as I say, and this is our new statement, the system is full.
If you look at our southern border, the number of people and the number of the amount of drugs, human trafficking, the human trafficking is something that nobody used to talk about.
I talk about it.
It's a terrible thing.
It's ancient and it's never been bigger than it is modern right now today.
All over the world, by the way, not just here, all over the world.
Human trafficking, a terrible thing.
And they come into the areas of the border where you don't have the wall.
They don't come through your points of entry.
They come into areas where you don't have the wall.
And they make a left or they make a right.
They come right into the country.
Loaded up with people in many cases.
And it's pretty sad.
So people are attacking Trump for saying that.
But listen, this is the same kind of thing.
This is the same kind of thing.
The problem we have with immigration is a spiritual problem, essentially.
We want to be kind.
We want to be generous.
We want to let in as many people as we can.
But the rule of law matters.
It matters that when we pass laws, and remember the same people who are not enforcing these laws passed the laws in the first place.
And it also matters that the kind of people who we let in are the kind of people who can continue and support the kind of country that made them want to come here in the first place.
You can't say everybody wants to come here and we're evil.
That doesn't make any sense.
You can't say everybody wants to come here, but we stink for not letting them in.
We don't stink for not letting them in.
We're trying to preserve and protect the country that they want to come to in the first place.
I'm all for generosity, but it's got to be done through the rule of law, which all Trump has ever said from the beginning.
Kirsten Nielsen has resigned.
She was apparently wrong-footed by Trump, and Trump is kind of, kind of piling on a little blame on her.
And of course, the press wants to blame her for all the separations of children.
But that is ridiculous.
All they want is to blame Trump for the situation of the border.
He's not to blame.
The situation at the border has been what it is, but he is obviously getting extremely, extremely frustrated.
And it has to do with the fact that Congress no longer works.
Congress no longer does its job.
Trump is talking about that, but you can see he is reaching a breaking point.
He's gotten rid of Kirsten Nielsen.
He's appointed this guy, Kevin McAlinen, who's the head of customs and border protection, who's supposed to be a hardliner.
We'll see where that goes.
But obviously, Trump is really frustrated because Congress is broken.
A final reflection.
I have to talk about this.
One of the problems that we on the right have is how do we end the apology culture without ending apologies?
Because of course, Trump is a good role model in not apologizing to the left whenever they twist your words and all this stuff.
But sometimes you do something wrong and you should apologize for it.
But the actress Anastasia Lin, who is originally from China, I believe, writes a piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Cultural Revolution Comes to North America.
And the Cultural Revolution is a good thing to remember.
This is something that Mao did because Mao was nuts and all his communist programs didn't work.
Not only did they not work, they caused massive, massive famines.
There was a massive famine from 1959 to around 1961, I think it was.
Massive tens of millions of people dying because of collectivization, because they took people's individual farms away, because Mao declared how much vegetables you could get out of an acre of land, which had nothing to do with reality.
And because of that, people were afraid to plant anything because they would be thrown in prison if they didn't get the amount they were supposed to get.
And so, Mao's policies just destroyed the country.
And he did, and I'm not combining, I don't want to compare Obama to Mao here, but it is the same thing that the same principle that when Obama's policies didn't work, he suddenly started pointing, look over there, the cops are racist.
Look over there, transgenders can't use the bathroom.
Well, when Mao did it, he started screaming, look over there, we've got to purge the evil capitalists and Western sympathizers from our midst.
And he set the kids up again off against each other and off against the adults.
So suddenly, students were beating teachers up and throwing them out.
Suddenly, they were reporting on their parents and all this stuff.
It was this so-called cultural revolution that gutted the intellectual classes of China, just an absolute atrocity to cover up the fact that communism doesn't work.
And so, what Anastasia Lynn is writing about is the way social media now is fulfilling that means.
Obviously, it's not as bad as the Cultural Revolution, but it's the same principles at work.
She talks about a friend of hers, Kaylin Ford, who spent her career advocating for international human rights and supporting victims of religious persecution.
She was going to run for office in Canada.
This is in the Canadian province of Alberta.
But then they caught her saying something about the fact that everybody, nobody allows you to question Islamism and its relationship to Islam.
But the minute somebody talks about white supremacy and you start to think about, well, what causes white supremacy, then suddenly you're tagged as a white supremacist.
So she was tagged as a white supremacist, even though saying she thought white supremacy was abhorrent.
This is kind of what's happening, this chasing down of people, this calling them out for anything they say.
And look, all of us say things that we wish we didn't say.
Every single one of us says it.
If that is going to end our careers, if that's going to end a person's career, it can be done to anybody.
And it just becomes a question of who has the most power, who has the most strength.
You know, I think we, it's a sad thing when you can't apologize for being wrong because you should be able to say, oops, I shouldn't have said that.
Right.
Gee, I lost my temper.
That was a dumb thing to say.
Maybe I had a couple of drinks and I shouldn't have said it.
You should be able to do that.
But in this constant, current, in this current climate, it really behooves you to stand firm against people.
And I think that that's a terrible thing.
This is a terrible system where you can't even apologize when you're wrong because they will not accept your apology and they'll come to get you.
Right-wingers have to think about this.
We cannot be so fast to fire people, to destroy people, to ditch people because we're afraid of the left.
We have to stand by each other and accept apologies and model that so that we can show the left to be what it is, to be an unforgiving, graceless movement that has replaced God with politics.
Stand Firm Against the Left00:00:54
I got to stop there.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
be back from Hillsdale College tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show, at an event before Al Sharpton's National Action Network, freshman congresswoman AOC inexplicably transforms into a black Southern preacher.